Ariela Gross | "Of Portuguese Origin": Litigating Identity and Citizenship among the "Little Races" in Nineteenth-Century America | Law and History Re

Exerpt:

"Historians have only begun to tell the histories of "red and black" peoples in the United States, and much of their attention has focused on the "Black Indians" of the Five Civilized Tribes of the Southeastern United States.1 Yet up and down the eastern seaboard, there were clusters of people who shared African, European, and Indian ancestry, many of whom lived as distinct and separate communities into the nineteenth and even the mid-twentieth centuries, some retaining or struggling to retain Indian identities, others becoming known as "free people of color," and still others claiming whiteness"